Somebody was just a little naive.

Reflections on the oldest profession by Theodore Dalrymple. After reading E. W. Hornung and Guy de Maupassant, Dalrymple says he "learned what my subsequent experience, which includes an acquaintance with several hundred burglars at least, has confirmed, namely not to place too great a reliance on a haphazard knowledge of imaginative literature for an accurate picture of the world.

"I do not regret my literary initiation into the world of crime and prostitution, and a world without literature would be, to me, an intolerable one, in which life would hardly be worth living. But had my life taken a different turn, had I not been able to test E. W. Hornung and de Maupassant against certain experienced realities, had I lived entirely through books, as I might easily have done, had I lived in a pleasing ivory tower, for example by being a university teacher (as my temperament might easily have inclined me to be), I think I should have had a much distorted and reduced, though no doubt much more comfortable, Weltanschauung, an altogether more pleasing view of life and the human condition."

No wonder he's so put off by the losers he runs into.

(via aldaily, as is the item below)